Forty years ago, when George Lucas was inventing the “Star Wars”
universe, he drew on many
influences.
He combined “Flash Gordon” with “The Golden Bough”; samurai with
dogfights; the New Age mysticism of Carlos Castaneda with the heroic
resistance, as he saw it, of the Viet Cong. The illustrator Ralph
McQuarrie’s hallucinatory drawings of ships, bases, and aliens were
decisive, as was Lucas’s love of cars. As a teen-ager, Lucas had been a
champion autocross racer—he planned to become a professional racecar
driver, until suffering a devastating crash just before his high-school
graduation—and it was from auto racing that the “Star Wars” films
derived their trademark velocity. Science fiction is often static and
cerebral, with stoic astronauts floating in space, flipping switches and
gazing at screens. “Star Wars” envisioned a world of constant
acceleration, in which piloting a spaceship was as simple as jumping on
a motorcycle. Its heroes could careen from planet to planet at will.
Forget mission control, or control of any kind—in “Star Wars,”
improvisation reigned.

From this perspective, the fate of “Star Wars” has been especially
ironic. In theory, it’s the fun, free-wheeling sci-fi franchise. In
practice, it’s a strangely narrow and cramped dramatic world. Perhaps
because the first three films were built up too much, and subjected,
over the years, to the pressure of too much love, their zigs and zags
have hardened into formula. As a result, almost everything in “Star
Wars: The Last Jedi,” which was released on December 15th, is familiar,
not just from past films in the franchise but from every past “Star
Wars” film. Apparently, it’s impossible to imagine a galaxy far, far
away in which the Millennium Falcon doesn’t weave through a canyon and
Rebel bases are not besieged; there must always be a Jedi warrior with a
British accent, and bands of resistance fighters must always include a
raffish rogue with cool hair; someone must always conceive a crazy plan
to sneak into an enemy stronghold and then get caught. Just as one’s
dreams converge on the same situations (the pop quiz, the dentist’s
office), so “Star Wars” seems to take place in a dream world in which
old friends are perpetually reuniting and nobody can find his or her
parents. For some fans, all this repetition makes a new “Star Wars” film
an anxious experience. In a discussion about the “The Last Jedi” on the
sci-fi Web site io9, viewers report “tensing up” when they hear musical
cues evoking prior films and getting “flashes of the prequels” during
the new movie’s lighter moments. They know the old movies so well that
the new one is perceived not in itself but as a series of departures
from a cherished template.

The directors of the new wave of “Star Wars” films have coped with the
prison of fandom in different ways. In 2015’s “The Force Awakens,” the
director J. J. Abrams told a completely derivative “Star Wars” story,
placating fans who were desperate for the “magic” of the originals,
while boring everyone else. Last year, Gareth Edwards went out on a limb
with “Rogue One”—an atmospheric, sombre, and tragic film in which
(spoiler alert) all the heroes die. With this year’s “The Last Jedi,”
Rian Johnson has split the difference: he’s made a familiar-feeling
“Star Wars” film in which many of the franchise’s tropes are serially
subverted. For once—read no further if you haven’t seen the film!—the
crazy long-shot plan turns out to be a bad idea and a waste of time; the
rebellious charm of the hotshot who comes up with it is revealed as
narcissistic immaturity. In a new twist, the dark side of the
Force—previously associated exclusively with scaly old men—is shown to
be sexy: in one of the film’s best moments, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill)
busts in on Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) while
they’re flirting by means of a telepathic link. The movie contemplates
the possibility that the Jedi religion isn’t all it’s cracked up to be;
there are even hints that the aristocratic family saga at the heart of
the “Star Wars” story is a red herring, and that ordinary people can
become Jedis. All of these departures from the norm don’t necessarily
add up to riveting drama—they’re inside baseball rather than truly new
developments in the plot—but they do buy the film (and perhaps its
sequels) some tonal breathing room.

There are moments when “The Last Jedi” questions the “Star Wars” formula
in a deeper way. Benicio Del Toro plays a cynical computer hacker who
thinks there’s no point fighting for either the Rebels or the First
Order; to him, they are two sides in a Manichean struggle that will
never end. When he says, of the conflict, “It’s a machine,” he might be
describing the “Star Wars” franchise, which depends for its continued
existence on a story of perpetual war. Kylo Ren, for his part,
articulates a convincing exhaustion with the universe in which he finds
himself. He tells Rey that she’s trapped by their shared past and offers
a simple solution: “Kill it.” The creative minds behind the franchise
must wish they could do this, too; in fact, shortly before the première
of “The Last Jedi,” Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm,
announced that Rian Johnson would be creating an all-new “Star Wars”
trilogy with no connection to the Skywalker family saga. It would be,
she wrote, “a blank canvas.”

The film’s best scenes question the relentless optimism of “Star Wars.”
In one, Rey descends into a cave to confront the dark side of the Force;
there, she has a vision in which she is multiplied. Infinite Reys stand
in a line, receding into the distance in both directions. Rey snaps her
fingers, and the snap travels through the line like a vibration along a
string, starting behind her and proceeding through her. The image evokes
the futility of Rey’s search for origins—she’s preceded and followed
only by herself—while also suggesting a grim cyclicality: it’s as if
there will always be more Reys, fighting the same fight forever. (That’s
pretty much true: Disney has eight new “Star Wars” films in development,
and the next one, which focusses on the young Han Solo, is only five
months away.) In another vision, she sees the world as a system of
opposites: light and dark, life and death, love and rage, the dark side
and the light. There’s a pleasing symmetry to this view of the universe,
but if the cosmos is truly constructed this way, then the good side can
never win, because good and evil will always be evenly matched. In such
a universe, one might reach personal enlightenment, but life in general
can never be perfected—neither politically nor psychologically.

Was “Star Wars” always so philosophical? Or did it stumble into this
glum view of life by accident, as its original saga repeated itself and
its world, as a consequence, grew smaller and darker? Personally, I
enjoy the dark undertones of “Rogue One” and “The Last Jedi.” I also
suspect that they’re not really in the spirit of “Star Wars.” If the
franchise is going to recapture the joy and dynamism it once had, it
will have to break out of its loop—just as “Star Trek,” for example, has
changed over the decades, incorporating new ideas (and bad guys).
Perhaps the “Star Wars” franchise has fallen victim to an interpretive
mistake. For many years, in trying to explain the appeal of the original
films, fans and critics cited their mythic qualities; they read Joseph
Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” and praised the movies’
supposedly “universal” dramatic shape. In fact, they had it backward.
The magic of “Star Wars” was never the formula. It was novelty.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.

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